motor-transportation-trade-unionism-and-the-culture-of-work-in-colonial-ghana

The organizing strategies and practices of drivers formed the framework of a ‘‘mobility system’’ rooted in cultures of masculinity, respectability, appren-ticeship, entrepreneurialism, a

Motor Transportation, Trade Unionism, and the

Culture of Work in Colonial Ghana

JE N N I F E R HA R T

Department of History, Wayne State University

3094 FAB, 656 W Kirby, Detroit, MI 48202, USA

E-mail: Jennifer.hart4@wayne.edu

A BSTRACT : The emergence of drivers’ unions in the 1920s and 1930s highlights the

wide range of strategies for social and economic organization available to workers

in the Gold Coast Particularly among workers who operated outside the

con-ventional categories of the colonial economy, unions provided only one of many

models for labor organization This article argues that self-employed drivers

appropriated unions and an international discourse of labor organization in the

early twentieth century in order to best represent their interests to the colonial

government However, their understanding of the function and organization of

unions reflected a much broader repertoire of social and economic organizing

practices Rather than representing any exceptional form of labor organization,

drivers highlight the circulation of multiple ideas surrounding labor organization

in the early decades of the twentieth century, which informed the ways in which

Africans engaged in the wage labor economy and implicitly challenged British

colonial assumptions about labor, authority, and control.

In 1935, experienced drivers and local political and religious officials

gathered under palm trees along the beach in La, an eastern suburb of

Accra, capital of the Gold Coast, to inaugurate a new drivers’ union La

was widely recognized by both colonial officials and African workers as

the colony’s preeminent center for driver training and practice The new

members designated a chief driver and a linguist, who were to facilitate

the work of the union, and the new officers swore an oath of office on a

steering wheel.1

In organizing themselves into a union, La drivers were participating in a

broader culture of associational life among entrepreneurial African drivers

1 Gene Quarshie (Chairman), P Ashai Ollennu (Vice-Chairman), and Simon Djetey Abe

(Secretary), La Drivers’ Union Officers Group, La, Accra, 23 March 2009, interview by the

author.

in the 1930s – one that drew both on the international language of trade

unionism and indigenous cultures of labor organization The material and

symbolic culture of chieftaincy (‘‘chief driver’’, ‘‘linguist’’, for example) was

the most visible and superficial example of the extent to which local practices

of work and authority influenced an emerging union culture among drivers

The organizing strategies and practices of drivers formed the framework of a

‘‘mobility system’’ rooted in cultures of masculinity, respectability,

appren-ticeship, entrepreneurialism, and state regulation in the region.2By adapting

these indigenous practices to emerging systems of trade unionism, drivers in

La and throughout the colony sought to organize their work to provide

better service for passengers and represent their interests to the state

The culture of drivers’ unions and work lives differed substantially

from the unionized railway workers, dockworkers, civil service employees,

and other waged laborers who followed more conventional models of union

organization and who participated in forms of work defined by British

colonial capitalism By transporting goods for trade, drivers were central to

systems of exchange and accumulation in the colony, facilitating the

expansion of a colonial capitalist economy While drivers derived

socio-economic benefits from this system, which they used to establish lives of

masculine respectability and prestige in colonial society, they did so with

significantly greater autonomy than other African workers in the colonial

economy Most drivers were self-employed, owning their own vehicles and

solely controlling the profits from their business In transporting both goods

and people throughout the colony, drivers, as indigenous entrepreneurs,

facilitated the connections and mobility of overlapping entrepreneurial

networks Peasant farmers, market traders, and drivers worked together to

reshape the colonial economy and defined a new future for their country,

not in political terms, but through the language and practices of economic

self-interest Likewise, drivers, who were largely self-employed, interpreted

the function and structure of unions in light of indigenous practices of the

organization of labor and the expression and exercise of authority

The unionization of drivers reflected the culmination of nearly three

decades of African attempts to claim control of motor transportation

from the colonial authorities and regulate access to it on their own terms

Africans appropriated motor vehicles in large numbers soon after their

introduction into the Gold Coast Colony in the first decade of the

twentieth century By the 1930s, motor transportation was well established as

an important commercial activity among Africans in the southern Gold

Coast, providing economic opportunities for young African men outside

colonial pathways of education and respectability and enabling Africans to

define their own version of modern mobility Drivers were entrepreneurs,

2 John Urry, Mobilities (Cambridge, 2007), p 116.

who saved their profits to purchase their own vehicles and attain economic

autonomy By transporting both goods and people and connecting rural

villages with urban markets, drivers provided an essential public service,

which facilitated the continued growth of the Gold Coast market economy

and the prosperity of traders and cocoa farmers throughout the southern half

of the colony At the same time, it challenged colonial attempts to control

African mobility and economic activity

By the 1930s, it became clear to colonial officials that African motor

transportation could no longer be ignored After decades of neglect in

road construction and maintenance and limited investment in motor

transport regulation and infrastructure, the British colonial state

imple-mented a new and extensive set of motor traffic regulations in 1934, which

sought to control motor transportation more directly, defining both

driving practice as well as ‘‘the type of man who could be a driver’’ In

response, drivers organized themselves into countless local professional

associations, such as the Bekwai Transport Union, and national umbrella

organizations like the Gold Coast Motor Union These organizations

quickly engaged in strikes, as well as petition-writing campaigns to the

colonial Governor, seeking to limit the effects of the shifting parameters

of government regulation on drivers’ livelihoods

In forming associations and unions, self-employed drivers appropriated

the language and practices of British trade unionism rooted in the

experiences of the British working class – waged workers in the employ of

industrial capital Based on such a definition of trade unionism, scholars

of African labor unions in the decades immediately following

indepen-dence criticized these organizing efforts, which in their view, focused too

much on either state employees and or the self-employed.3The centralized

nature of colonial capitalism – in which both labor and resources were

concentrated in the extractive structures of the colonial state – limited the

growth of African industry and independent waged labor Thus, unionized

Africans directed their activities towards the state, which regulated the

conditions of work for both state employees and self-employed groups

throughout the colony

Dockworkers and railway workers, in particular, used their unions to

speak out against the abuses of colonial rule and the conditions of life for

the African working class in a number of colonies.4In part, the success of

3 See, for example, R.B Davison, ‘‘Labor Relations in Ghana’’, Annals of the American

Academy of Political and Social Science, 310 (March 1957), pp 133–141; Jon Kraus, ‘‘African

Trade Unions: Progress or Poverty?’’, African Studies Review, 19:3 (December 1976),

pp 95–108; Charles A Orr, ‘‘Trade Unionism in Colonial Africa’’, The Journal of Modern

African Studies, 4 (1966), pp 65–81.

4 Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and

British Africa (Cambridge, 1996); idem, On the African Waterfront: Urban Disorder and the

dockworkers and railway workers’ unions lay in their conventionality;

these unions mobilized state employees and waged laborers who protested

the conditions of their employment and engaged in collective bargaining

However, trade unionism on the continent extended far beyond the limits of

the continent’s relatively small waged labor force, incorporating

entrepre-neurs, traders, farmers, and drivers, among others, in a widespread labor

movement, which had widely varying political motivations and organizing

strategies The expansiveness and inclusiveness of African trade unionism

often drew criticisms from early observers, who argued that the

appropria-tion of the union model by unconvenappropria-tional sectors of the labor force

reflected the degree to which Africans failed to understand the meaning and

function of unions.5

African trade unions were indeed different from their British models

However, trade unionism did not emerge (or arrive) in a vacuum British

trade unionists sent to the Gold Coast met a complex set of societies with

their own structures, rules, and logics of labor organization As scholars

like Fred Cooper and Keletso Atkins have demonstrated elsewhere on the

continent, African workers often interpreted European conditions and

expectations of labor in light of indigenous cultures of work.6In taking

these indigenous cultures of work seriously, we must also consider ‘‘what

African workers brought to the workplace’’.7 Much like the ways in

which Africans appropriated and adapted Western structures to make

them locally meaningful in other aspects of colonial society, culture, and

economy, unions did not merely appear as an importation but rather

emerged from and in collaboration with local cultures and practices of

work Both unions and indigenous forms of labor organization and

economic accumulation were transformed in the process

This article explores the meaning and significance of early union

formation among self-employed African drivers in light of these scholarly

Transformation of Work in Colonial Mombasa (New Haven, CT, 1987); Richard Jeffries, Class,

Power and Ideology in Ghana: The Railwaymen of Sekondi (Cambridge, 2009); Lisa Lindsay,

Working with Gender: Wage Labor and Social Change in Southwestern Nigeria (Portsmouth,

NH, 2003).

5 Roger Scott, ‘‘Are Trade Unions Still Necessary in Africa?’’, Transition 33 (October–

November 1967), pp 27–31; Lester N Trachtman, ‘‘The Labor Movement of Ghana: A Study

in Political Unionism’’, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 10 (1962), pp 183–200.

6 Cooper, On the African Waterfront; idem, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and

Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890–1925 (New Haven, CT, 1981); Keletso

Atkins, The Moon is Dead! Give Us Our Money! The Cultural Origins of an African Work

Ethic, Natal, South Africa, 1843–1900 (Portsmouth, NH, 1993).

7 Ibrahim Abdullah, ‘‘Rethinking African Labor and Working-Class History: The Artisan

Origins of the Sierra Leonean Working Class’’, Social History, 23 (1998), pp 80–96, 80;

Frederick Cooper, ‘‘Work, Class and Empire: An African Historian’s Retrospective on

E.P Thompson’’, Social History, 20 (1995), pp 235–241, 236.

discourses about ‘‘indigenous cultures of work’’ and the emergence of

pre-colonial working-class consciousness among artisans and other

tradespeople along the West African littoral.8 In particular, I argue that

the emergence of drivers’ unions in the 1920s and 1930s, and the structure

and function of those unions, highlight the wide range of strategies

for social and economic organization available to workers in the Gold

Coast Particularly among workers, such as drivers, who operated

outside the conventional categories of the colonial economy (wage

laborer, subsistence farmer, slave, for instance), unions provided only one

of many models for labor organization Drivers also strategically drew on

indigenous cultures of entrepreneurialism, apprenticeship, and chieftaincy

in order to organize their labor and secure respect, authority, and

legiti-macy, among both African communities and the colonial state As a result,

drivers’ unions that formed in the 1930s looked far different from both

British models and indigenous practices of labor organization These new

unions facilitated the continued economic autonomy of drivers in the

midst of increasing efforts at state regulation

In order to understand drivers’ practices of labor organization, it is

necessary to understand the broader culture and economy of which they

were a part This article situates the emergence of drivers’ unions within

the various coexisting systems of labor organization in the Gold Coast,

paying particular attention to the role of entrepreneurialism,

apprentice-ship, and the state/chieftaincy in local economies of production and trade

Drivers drew on these indigenous cultures and practices of work in order

to guarantee their legitimacy and authority among local populations

When the state required union formation and registration in the 1930s as a

condition of negotiation, drivers adapted these local practices within a

union framework In the process, they reshaped expectations and

understandings of both local economies and union organization

M U LT I P L E L A N G U A G E S O F L A B O R

In the Gold Coast, African engagement with the British colonial cash

economy as either waged laborers or entrepreneurs in the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries drew on a much longer history of economic activity at

local, regional, and trans-continental levels Similar to the ways in which

laborers in southern and eastern Africa brought indigenous

under-standings of work to the farms, docks, and railways of these British settler

colonies, African understandings of labor in the Gold Coast were also

rooted in long-standing indigenous cultures of work In particular, indigenous

8 Abdullah, ‘‘Rethinking African Labor and Working-Class History’’; Peter Gutkind, ‘‘The

Canoemen of the Gold Coast (Ghana): A Survey and an Exploration in Precolonial African

Labour History’’, Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, 29 (1989), pp 339–376.

political leaders controlled access to land and resources within local

economies that were dominated by entrepreneurs and organized through

systems of apprenticeship Through these systems of labor organization,

both leaders and the general population sought to balance the regulation

of resources and infrastructure with the values of economic autonomy

and entrepreneurialism

Local labor practices and economic institutions were part of regional

and transnational networks of trade and exchange, which connected

Africans throughout the western part of the continent and spurred local

economic production Local leaders who sought to profit from these trade

networks engaged in often large-scale mobilization and organization of

labor for agriculture, trade, mining, and other pursuits.9Labor organization

for both local production needs and long-distance trade throughout the

southern Gold Coast inevitably varied among economic sectors and ethnic

groups Among politically centralized Akan communities in the forests of

the interior, agriculture and gold mining tended to be more directly

con-trolled by chiefs, who mobilized the labor of villagers to tend their own

farms or work in mines and who controlled access to land and at least a

portion of the produce of individual effort in the form of tribute and/or

taxes However, much of the profits from agricultural produce like palm oil

and cocoa remained with entrepreneurial cash-crop farmers

When cocoa production surpassed palm oil as the colony’s major export

in the nineteenth century, cocoa farmers also had to mobilize and control

labor to work their rapidly expanding farms, often accumulating multiple

wives and children to provide farm labor and employing local youth and

women to tend farms and help with the harvest and transport.10 While

occupations were gendered, the boundaries of that gendered division of

labor had shifted by the early twentieth century with the introduction and

expansion of cocoa farming As men left the markets to set up cocoa

farms, women took their place, utilizing new technologies of mobility to

dominate both local and long-distance trade throughout the region.11

Young men and women learned trades and skills through formal or

informal apprenticeships, assisting (often related) adults in work on farms,

at mines, at the market, or in the water Among less centralized societies

9 As Beverly Grier argues, in pre-colonial societies where land was abundant, but population

densities were relatively low, ‘‘the struggle to control labor power was at the heart of social and

political organization’’; Beverly Grier, ‘‘Pawns, Porters, and Petty Traders: Women in the

Transition to Cash Crop Agriculture in Colonial Ghana’’, Signs, 17 (1992), pp 304–328, 307.

10 Ibid.

11 Gracia Clark, Onions Are My Husband: Survival and Accumulation by West African Market

Women (Chicago, IL, 1995); Claire Robertson, Sharing the Same Bowl: A Socioeconomic History of

Women and Class in Accra, Ghana (Bloomington, IN, 1984); Jean Allman and Victoria Tashjian,

I Will Not Eat Stone: A Women’s History of Colonial Asante (Portsmouth, NH, 2000); Stephan

Miescher, Making Men in Ghana (Bloomington, IN, 2005).

like the Ga, commercial activities such as fishing and the trade in smoked

fish were often also organized at the household level, as both men and

women collected, processed, and traded the coastal commodity.12

Across all of these societies, however, the state played a central role in

regulating access to resources and dictating the conditions of possibility

for various forms of work The state often maintained a much tighter

control on the activities of traders, who generated significant wealth

In Asante, for example, individuals had to obtain the permission of the

Asantehene (King of the Asante) in order to travel for the purposes of

trade Although Asante traders were, to a large extent, entrepreneurs, they

represented the Asante state in their trading activities.13Other groups of

‘‘artisans’’, including weavers, blacksmiths, goldsmiths, and musicians,

were often employed directly by the royal court, which protected access

to privileged royal symbols and technical skills passed down through

formal apprenticeships.14

Despite the importance of the state in regulating economic conditions

and possibilities, however, Kwame Arhin argues that even in politically

centralized states like the Asante, ‘‘[t]here were [y] no landlords and

tenants, owners of capital and labourers There were husbands and wives

as owners of farms, master craftsmen, and long-distance traders, and their

nnipa (sing onipa), lit ‘human beings’, but in this context dependants,

who did not belong to socially or politically opposed groups.’’15For some

members of Asante communities, these small-scale economic activities

enabled them to take their places within a relatively hierarchical Asante

state and society However, for others, the relative autonomy of the

Asante economy made it possible to establish themselves as ‘‘indigenous

entrepreneurs’’.16

These ‘‘indigenous entrepreneurs’’ played a significant role in shaping

the social, political, and economic possibilities of Asante society – a

sig-nificance acknowledged by their distinguished status as obirempon

(Asante Twi: ‘‘big men’’) As Dumett explains through his analysis of

African merchants, the category of ‘‘entrepreneur’’ should not be casually

applied to every small-scale economic agent However, ‘‘[a]n entrepreneur

certainly does not have to be an industrialist; he can be a trader, farmer, or

12 Robertson, Sharing the Same Bowl.

13 There are, of course, exceptions to this general statement, as illustrated by Kwame Arhin,

‘‘Trade, Accumulation and the State in Asante in the Nineteenth Century’’, Africa, 60 (1990),

pp 524–537.

14 J.H Kwabena Nketia, Drumming in Akan Communities of Ghana (London, 1963).

15 Kwame Arhin, ‘‘Rank and Class among the Asante and Fante in the Nineteenth Century’’,

Africa, 53 (1983), p 5.

16 Raymond Dumett, ‘‘Tropical Forests and West African Enterprise: The Early History of the

Ghana Timber Trade’’, African Economic History, 29 (2001), pp 79–116, 92.

skilled craftsman.’’ Entrepreneurs are ‘‘change agents’’ who organize

pro-duction and distribution in novel ways.17 Entrepreneurialism does not,

however, negate the importance of the state in organizing and regulating

economic activity and access to capital and resources Even in ‘‘port cities’’18

at the edge of the Sahara and on the coast, where a professional class of

traders operated for personal profit rather than as direct agents of the state,

local leaders, colonial officials and European merchant houses often heavily

mediated access to both goods and transport.19

While indigenous understandings of work and economy profoundly

shaped early interactions with Europeans, the increase in European trade

and the introduction of the cash economy beginning in the fifteenth

century also introduced new forms and understandings of work and

economic accumulation Early coastal trading interactions spawned a

number of new occupational categories or expanded existing occupations,

including but not limited to traders, canoe men, and carriers Africans

who engaged in the earliest forms of casual waged labor at the coast

organized for the purposes of bargaining for better pay and working

conditions Their importance as a labor force was crucial to the

func-tioning of the colonial economy, adding extra weight to their demands

in interactions with early European traders and colonial officials in

the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Canoe men, for example,

who, in large part due to their autonomy as casual workers, could

withdraw their labor in protest over conditions and pay, regularly

halted economic activity at the coast to the detriment of European

commercial interests.20 However, these casual workers also largely

followed indigenous patterns of labor organization, rooted in the efforts

of individual entrepreneurs and their apprentices, operating within

limitations imposed by the colonial state and the demands of merchants

operating at coastal ports

C U LT U R E S O F W O R K A N D T H E M O B I L I T Y O F M O T O R

T R A N S P O RTAT I O N

Early economic interactions between Europeans and Africans laid the

foundation for a colonial economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

that was heavily dependent on the economic contributions of African

entrepreneurs in agriculture, mining, trade, and transportation While some

17 Idem, ‘‘African Merchants of the Gold Coast, 1860–1905: Dynamics of Indigenous

Entrepreneurship’’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 25 (1983), pp 661–693,

662–664.

18 Ghislaine Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and

Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth Century Western Africa (Cambridge, 2012).

19 Dumett, ‘‘African Merchants of the Gold Coast’’.

20 Gutkind, ‘‘Canoemen of the Gold Coast’’.

of these sectors experienced significant transformation in response to

new technologies and resources, both colonial officials’ and African

workers’ expectations of the colony’s economic future were rooted in

indigenous economic practices and networks African men took up work

as motor transport drivers in this context of broader economic activity

in the Gold Coast In particular, the expansion of motor transportation

and driving as an occupational category grew directly out of the activities

of cocoa farmers, who viewed motor vehicles as a wise investment in the

1920s and 1930s.21

By the cocoa boom of the 1920s, farmers, traders, and a new category of

African transport owners and drivers began to construct their own

net-works and means of transportation, often outside colonial government

control and contrary to government interests Motor transportation not

only provided a new form of entrepreneurship that was accessible to

Africans in the Gold Coast, it also allowed farmers and traders to assert

greater control over the production and trade in primary commodities

such as cocoa.22 Parallel to this increasing demand for vehicles, after

World War I the Gold Coast was also home to a much larger population

of drivers While deployed in East Africa during World War I, half of the

Mechanical Transport Unit of the Gold Coast Regiment received training

as drivers Many of those who returned found work as drivers in the

booming cocoa industry of the 1920s Soon drivers began establishing

independent services, purchasing vehicles and hiring out their services to

traders, farmers, and other travellers By 1930, 4,987 vehicles were licensed in

the Gold Coast Colony.23

Emerging systems of training for drivers also reflected both the

con-tinuities and broader transformations in the colonial economy Much like

the apprenticeship systems that had traditionally served to train young

men and women in adult occupations, drivers developed systems of

21 As Polly Hill argues, lorry ownership and operation were some of the only ‘‘common

forms of economic enterprise which sprang directly from cocoa farming’’ By the beginning of

what Hill characterizes as the ‘‘lorry age’’ in 1918, ‘‘it became the fashion, for those who could

afford it, to travel by lorry for most of the way’’ during their migrations as cocoa farmers; Polly

Hill, The Migrant Cocoa-Farmers of Southern Ghana: A Study in Rural Capitalism (London,

1998), pp 190, 234.

22 The lorry is so important to the rise of cocoa that Polly Hill uses the advent of the lorry to

establish periodization in her study of migrant Akwapim cocoa farmers She argues that 1918

marked the end of the pre-lorry age, which corresponds with evidence of an increase in the

number of drivers post-World-War-I as well as the increased investment in road building as a

result of Guggisberg’s Ten Year Development Plan See Hill, The Migrant Cocoa Farmers of

Southern Ghana, p 6.

23 Public Records and Archives Administration Department, National Archives of Ghana,

Accra, Ghana [hereafter, PRAAD-NAG], Colonial Secretary’s Office [hereafter, CSO] 14/2/

329 Road Transportation Board – Formation of.

training through which apprentices would learn the craft and skill of

driving work These apprentice drivers, or mates, entered into

relation-ships that were similar in many ways to indigenous apprenticerelation-ships

among skilled artisans Families often presented masters with drinks (beer,

gin, and/or akpeteshie),24cigarettes, and cash in payment for their services,

which then indentured the young man to the master as his ‘‘mate’’

Figure 1 ‘‘Mammy Trucks’’, 18 July 1968 A driver’s mate stands beside a mammy truck loaded

with passengers in Accra While the photograph dates from the 1960s, this type of vehicle had

been in use since the 1930s, with the structure of the vehicle generally unchanged from the

earliest forms of mass-produced vehicles Both drivers and passengers referred to these vehicles

as ‘‘Bedfords’’, after the British truck manufacturer, which dominated early imports ‘‘Bedford’’

came to represent a category of vehicle, consisting of an imported metal chassis and a locally

constructed wooden body Drivers and mates could easily change vehicles from passenger to

goods transport depending on the nature of their trips.

Photograph: George A Alhassan Copyright: Ministry of Information (Ghana), Information

Services Photographic Archive, ref no R/R/9175/13 Used with permission.

24 Akpeteshie is a type of local gin distilled from palm wine For more information on the

history of akpeteshie, see Emmanuel Akyeampong, ‘‘What’s in a Drink? Class Struggle, Popular

Culture and the Politics of Akpeteshie (Local Gin) in Ghana 1930–67’’, Journal of African

History, 37 (1996), pp 215–236.

Being a mate entailed a number of responsibilities, including the basic

maintenance and cleanliness of the vehicle (washing the vehicle, checking

vehicle fluid levels, for instance), loading and unloading goods, obtaining

passengers (i.e fighting for passengers) in lorry parks, aiding the master in

repairing the vehicle, and other domestic responsibilities in the master’s

household, including ironing, pounding fufu,25 sweeping, and cleaning

In exchange, mates were often given lodging and food, as well as driver

training Driving apprenticeships were also highly gendered, and driving

was considered inherently masculine work that required both physical

and mental strength to survive the difficulties and dangers of the road

For those who grew up in communities like La (a suburb east of Accra),

which was closely associated with driving in the first decades of the

twentieth century and where driving had been established as a dominant

occupation since at least the 1910s, young men saw driving as a desirable

and respected family tradition As a result, entering into an apprenticeship

as a driver’s mate seemed like a natural extension of local economies

and cultures of work For drivers like J.F Ocantey, growing up in a

household and community of drivers exposed him to the profession and its

skills early and the sons of drivers often followed their fathers, uncles, or

elder brothers into the profession Driving, for Ocantey, was a ‘‘hobby’’ from

an early age, and early exposure gained through helping relatives inculcated a

passion for driving work and provided him with early training.26

When Ocantey later entered into an apprenticeship under master driver

N.V Labadi he fully understood the profession in both its technical and

social dimensions, and he benefited from the support and encouragement

of family members As Ocantey describes, for those who grew up in La,

driving was ‘‘in their blood’’:

For the driving, they born us in the driving work because where we were born

from, driving is the work that most of the people have been doing That is the

reason why – our area here in La, we like driving You should understand that

La people are the people who brought driving into the system because the first

driver in Ghana here, he come from La Before it spread around the whole of

Ghana – it’s La it started from The thing is, this man sitting here – his father is a

driver, so he was born in the driving work because his father is driving, and I

myself too, my senior brother was a driver so any time he always bring cars to

the house so even if he’s not there and I enter the car, once you spark the car and

you accelerate it, the car will move So that is what we’ve been doing – once our

fathers or brothers brought the cars to the house for us to wash, we would be

25 Fufu is a local food staple, most commonly made by pounding cassava and plantain (though

also sometimes with yam) Fufu is pounded with a large mortar and pestle and often requires

two people – one to pound and one to turn the product.

26 Ibrahim Ato, Anum Sowah, Yii O Yem, J.F Ocantey, La Drivers’ Union Group Interview,

Accra, 26 March 2009, interview by the author.

sparking the cars and that brought our interest, so that make us to have the

interest of the driving work 27

For those young men without any family connections to the driving

profession or who did not come from a community of drivers, driving

work was appealing precisely because of its novelty Young boys like

Coblah Nimo who lived in farming and fishing communities often

stopped work to watch as ‘‘mammy’’ trucks and other motor vehicles

passed Mammy trucks, which were named for their most frequent

passen-gers (market women, aka ‘‘mammies’’), were hybrid vehicles, consisting of an

imported metal engine and chassis and a locally constructed and painted

wooden body In the first half of the twentieth century, mammy trucks

dominated Gold Coast roads, as drivers carried market women into the

interior to purchase produce from farms and regional markets or to transport

the produce of wealthy cocoa farmers to coastal ports Traveling past villages

and farms, these vehicles captured the attention of many young boys who

were working or playing along the roadside The fascination with cars

extended into play, as boys pretended to be drivers, improvising imagined

vehicles and ‘‘blowing’’ horns (porpor) as they traveled back and forth to

collect water.28 When motor vehicles arrived in their villages, children

swarmed around them, looking at themselves in the reflection of the metallic

chassis and sitting behind the steering wheels pretending to drive.29Many of

those who ultimately became drivers described themselves as completely

occupied – if not spellbound – by the vehicle and its driver, and saw driving

as a calling or vocation that was ‘‘in their heart’’

However, for boys in rural areas outside driving communities, the

pursuit of driving and the experience of apprenticeship as mates marked a

distinctly different occupational path from that of their families.30While

many parents ultimately sought out connections through extended family

to secure apprenticeships for their sons with respected masters, such

training often implied relocation – as mates looked for masters in major

cities like Accra, where most drivers were based For these young men

and their families, embracing motor transportation as an occupation and

engaging in the apprenticeship system marked a significant diversion from

local economies and communities, even as their mobility connected these

communities to larger markets and systems of economic exchange

Regardless of their background, however, most young mates received the

same training in the technical and social skills of driving work Saving

27 Ibid.

28 Ibid.

29 Anonymous Circle Odawna Driver, Accra, 27 August 2009, interview by the author.

30 Ibrahim Ato, Anum Sowah, Yii O Yem, J.F Ocantey, La Drivers’ Union Group Interview,

Accra, 26 March 2009, interview by the author; Abraham Tagoe, Teshie Linguist, Accra,

5 August 2009, interview by the author.